Wolf Interviews: Caleb J Ross
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Your substack is more in line with what I initially intended my own newsletter to be about: videogames. I've spun wildly off the rails, but you've remained focused on games. Can you speak a bit about the idea behind your newsletter and why games?
Though video games have become incredibly popular over the last several decades, leading to heaps of writing from so many voices, I find that the writing content itself tends to fall into an unfortunately narrow band. Opinions/reviews of specific games. Documentary-style explorations of gaming history. Investigative journalism into the (sadly) poor state of the gaming industry. These things are all important and valid, but what's missing is writing about games as proxies for real life.
There's a concept that's popular in the fiction writing world called Theory of Mind, which says (among other things) that the human brain doesn't distinguish between relationships between fictional characters and relationships between real people. This means that people who read fiction tend to score better on tests that measure empathy. This means that people who read fiction tend to be more tolerant of other cultures. Fiction is a safe playground for the mind to tease out the norms of a foreign group, and therefore to expand the very concept of “normal.” Conversely, fiction is where we can reflect on the need for limits on “normal.” Either way, story challenges our hypotheses on life. I want video games to challenge our hypotheses on life, too.
This powerful lens isn't applied to video games like it should be. Video games stand to make Theory of Mind even more powerful because players can interact with the foreign groups. My substack, aptly called Video Games Are Real, is my effort to better understand the world by way of video games.
I've written about how playing video games while on vacation gave lasting weight that that vacation. I've written about how Fallout 4 saved my life. I've written about how video games have allowed me to practice talking to strangers (a skill I never developed as a shy child and a still-shy adult).
Every time I play a game, I'm receptive of what it's trying to teach me. Those learnings are what populate Video Games Are Real.
Games are often compared to movies or literature for this very reason, but I don't think games have had their Big Masterpiece yet. As in, there's no Citizen Kane or Ulysses of videogames. Why do you think that is?
As cliche as it sounds, if there is a Citizen Kane or Ulysses of gaming, I'd give Super Mario Bros. that credit. The first video game came out in 1958. Then, 25 years later, we get what will be the teacher for the next 40 years. It takes a generation to come to terms with a medium, then every generation later looks back on the first. Super Mario Bros. got so much right, where for 25 years prior games got so much wrong. Before terms like "juice" and "game feel" became chapters in game dev university textbooks, Super Mario Bros. had long established that language. Super Mario Bros. was genre-defying then and still is today. Everything is informed by that single game.
But, if we're looking for a Big Masterpiece that expands beyond what Super Mario Bros. has to teach, you're probably right, we might not have it yet. Though, given that video games are comprised of many more moving parts with many more brains contributing to the end goal, the idea of a Kane or Ulysses-type masterpiece might be a bit of a forced comparison. You can't solicit intent about a video game from a single game director the way you can with a single author or a single film director. For Suddenly I was a Shark, I touched on this topic with the game's Creative Director, Ian Dallas. His response, when I ask about the intent behind a certain visual element, was to give credit to the artist and fully admit that given the nature of game making, every developer has legitimate impact on the final product that even the Creative Director isn't fully aware of.
Given this reality, maybe we'll never get a Citizen Kane or Ulysses. I'm okay with that, though. The medium of video games is so maleable that I think I'd push against a single representation of perfection.
I've known you for about 15 years now. You were, in a way, a mentor when I was writing my first (failed) novel back in 2008 when I was living in Ireland. After publishing a few novels, you seem to have mostly shifted away from fiction. What caused that shift in focus? Where did that creative energy spill next?
I blame/credit age. A few years ago, I started reading a lot more non-fiction. Memoirs, mostly, but also a lot of whatever the genre of non-fiction is that Mary Roach writes...single-topic-hyper-explorations? And, of course, the Boss Fight Books series; a series that showed me people can have deep, extended thoughts about video games. All this reading, paired with my rising age, made me reflective. I became interested in validating my own life. I entertained writing my own memoir, but ultimately self-examination in that way wasn't satisfying. Call it imposter syndrome. Call it a simple lack of self-esteem. Call it crippling humility. I simply couldn't get past the idea that I didn't have an experience or ideas worth validating. It's a tough spot: to want validation but not feel deserving of it.
While all this mental turmoil was going on, I was years deep into my YouTube channel, which was already doing what my Substack would ultimately do: take video games seriously. But I was burnt out. Producing weekly videos takes a lot of time. I needed a change (and if you see my YouTube channel now, it's most videos of me bouldering...quite the change indeed). Boss Fight Books had a call for submissions, so I pitched a book about my favorite video game of all time, What Remains of Edith Finch (at this time, my previous book had been released about 5 years prior, so I was rusty). That pitch would then become my book Suddenly I was a Shark! My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch. It's part developer documentary, part literary examination, and yes, part memoir. So, it seems I finally got my memoir but by way of a video game. I could remain humble while also contributing something valid (and validating) to the world of video games.
Suddenly I was a Shark! My Time with What Remains of Edith Finch is a bit of a book-length manifesto of what Video Games Are Real aims to do in the blog post-length format.
Interestingly, I also began reading a lot more nonfiction once I left the literary world behind. I never planned to write memoirish pieces, but here I am doing it almost every week.
Now that Suddenly I was a Shark! is out, are you working on a new project?
I'm not actively working on a big project. Mostly, I'm writing bits and pieces with the intent that perhaps someday they could be expanded into something bigger. One such project might be a collection of essays about how video games have saved my life (where the Fallout 4 piece, I mentioned, would fit). I've also got cloudy, intangible dreams of maybe writing a book that incorporates my recent love of bouldering.
I have another writer friend who recently got into bouldering. Besides the very obvious dissimilarities, would you say there's any commonality between bouldering and writing, or just producing art more generally?
While bouldering doesn't really have that exploratory, fast-paced drafting stage where the writer learns what they are writing (bouldering has an obvious finish hold, often labeled in a big, obnoxious FINISH), otherwise they have a lot in common.
If most of writing is rewriting, then most of sending a boulder problem is re-sending. In the same way that a writer has a 6th sense about how good a sentence or paragraph is, the boulderer also knows when a transition or mantal or a pistol squat transition doesn't feel quite right. I write for the rush of a perfect sentence. And I climb for the rush of a perfect transition. As soon as I send a bouldering problem, I jump down and look up to the wall to figure out how I can "edit" the send into something better.
And while I'm a total proponent of Authorial Intentionalism, I am a fan of puzzle looking to be solved. Bouldering climbs are literally called "problems," because they are set by people as puzzles. There's generally an intended beta (solution). The shape of the holds, their placement, their angle, all these things are clues about how to send the problem. Even though I don't fully believe in the need for authorial intent, I do often wonder what authors meant when I read their work. I like the idea that there's an intent behind a piece of writing, but I love the freedom of not being forced to consider that intent in order to enjoy a work. Dismissing authorial intent on a bouldering problem is called "breaking beta."
Studying a problem before you attempt to climb it is even called "reading."
Final word?
Thanks for chatting with me about video games, a medium that has changed my life, and---through a certain lens--has even saved my life. But maybe "changing" is "saving." Hmm. Video games promise to become more capable of impacting the lives of players, and I plan to continue exploring that impact at my Video Games Are Real Subtask. And, one day, I'll even send a v7 boulder problem.
My novels:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.
Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers
Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.